News organizations cannot simply tax the public and then expect the public to have no say in how those news organizations are run. That's the messy bit journalists tend to forget when they think of taxes coming to the rescue. Also, sorry to point this out, but you have a *bad* typo in your third sentence.

@pschaeffer Indeed - as was Ferguson's. The latter - as sketched by The History Boys - has an instinct for provocation to match Krugman's now fervid politics; both make them, as the French say, mediatique. The result is entertainment of a sort but not much insight. The second point I wanted to raise was whether, epistemically, a Nobel in economics is closer to a Nobel in Chemistry or to a hypothetical Nobel in literary theory. One suspects Alfred Nobel might take a dim view of his prize being hijacked by a bank at a time when economics was losing intellectual prestige.

Good article. I think it would also be interesting to examine whether those on Wall Street who actually make money take either Ferguson or Krugman seriously. The data mavens I know - a small sample to be sure, but all of high intellectual wattage (PhDs in physics and philosophy and several MBAs) - are dismissive, and sometimes scathingly so, of both. One also has to wonder whether the creation and funding of a Nobel in economics in 1968, by a bank no less, has polemicized economics, given the alternating awards to monetarists and Keynsians. By contrast, awards in the hard sciences tend to reflect consensus within the field rather than an ongoing battle of ideas between constituencies. Add to this the aforementioned possibility of a very wide gap between practice and theory - a gap that is much narrower in the hard sciences, where to advance a theory is more often than not to engage in the practice of that theory - and the academic problem goes much deeper than a question of taking the money or commanding respect.